In my company, the tools are there, but the major impediment continues to be cultural. We have nationwide sales reps that rarely see the office, but for everyone else they are reluctant to let go of the control of physically seeing someone.

But we now have 2, and soon to be 3, developers working at least part time from home. I work full time in another city; another dev will soon be full time remote as well. Stuff still gets done right and on time. They are slowly learning to deal with not being able to "see" us at our desk, but there's still this attitude that crops up every now and then that "working from home" is having a day off.

I have a work-issued iPad. I am teleworking from across the country today. I am not using the iPad.

I use the iPad frequently while at work, to get access to our various databases while away from my desk. I hardly touch it at home, except maybe to be a pseudo-second monitor set up to show my mail. I'm not even doing that today, because I'm shuffling too many attachments. It is just too awkward to use to actually do work, and when using it to access our internal databases, I treat it almost as a read-only terminal, because it's easier just to make a note and make changes when I get back to my desk, than to fight the iPad to do it right now.

I am using my phone for teleworking and not as a phone. When my work lulls, it lets me walk away from my desk, but will beep at me if someone replies to an email and I need to get busy again.

And while most of my coworkers definitely do send emails from their phones at all hours of the day, I turn that off. My work email is normally set to Manual Fetch Only, and goes to Push only during my working hours. Period. End of story. Want me to check my email during other hours? Put "on call" in my job description and give me a raise.

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They are slowly learning to deal with not being able to "see" us at our desk, but there's still this attitude that crops up every now and then that "working from home" is having a day off.

Some people do view it that way. It's their supervisor's responsibility to make sure the work is getting done and the person is responsive while they are teleworking, and once a supervisor has one poor experience, everyone is a potential slacker.

With the trend of the endless work day accelerating, I am so happy I finally got out of the salary scam and went contractor. I have to pay my own health insurance, don't get paid for holidays and vacation, etc. but I make the same money on average and I get paid for every hour I work. Given that, those I contract for have a heavy incentive to keep me at 40 hours. When I was salary, if you did not work 60+ a week and more, you were passed over for promotions and raises, and had a target painted on your back for layoffs or passive-aggressive things like poor assignments or relocation to the worst cubicles they had.

It's so nice to have a life and a job rather than being forced to sacrifice one for the other.

Where I work it's pretty standard that people do not expect to be able to find you after 5 PM, and frankly it would take a HUGE jump in salary for me to even consider letting go of that. I've had to work a weekend or a late night, but it's not something that happens every week, usually it means something like "major report due next week."

I mean sure, I could probably make more money in another field or at another company, but I make enough and I place a large value on that clear work/life separation. Why do I need to double or triple my salary if I'm never going to have time to enjoy having that extra money?

I'm also thankfully too low on the totem pole to be offered a company-issued smartphone but I'd do everything I could to avoid getting one if they tried to give me one since they do say "by giving this to you, we expect you to be more/more immediately available."

My company has a whole battery of half-assed WFH solutions. Without getting into the details, here's one example: we VPN from wherever (as long as it's a Windows computer running IE 6-8) to get to a remote desktop that has limited access to corporate software. Really not very useful.

We can use out smart devices (Android, BB, iOS, or newer Windows), but we have to give corporate complate control, and they pay only a portion of the cost of the device. Not gonna happen, even ignoring the fact that they've accidently remote wiped my boss' iPad twice, and their dumbass setup breaks Android's multiuser functionality.

At the same time we get emails and calls at all hours, but they get cranky when we claim OT for 'em.

I think that, while my company is in total a bit of an outlier in total, it still represents a fundamental problem in how many or most corporations handle non-local users.

It's annoying to me as probably 85-90% of my workload is remote anyway; I'm RDPing or SSHing into servers. The rest _could_ be handled remotely, given reasonable access to fairly basic tools (like actual access to Exchange, and some kind of remote document access). I know the tools exist, but corporate culture is against implementing them.

In my company, the tools are there, but the major impediment continues to be cultural. We have nationwide sales reps that rarely see the office, but for everyone else they are reluctant to let go of the control of physically seeing someone.

There are two big problems with remote work that most companies haven't really solved. The first is management: if they can't see you they have the perception that they don't have a way to know that you're working. Which is, of course, incorrect, but since they haven't been trained in ways to gauge productivity without seeing you work it will remain the perception.

The second problem is collaboration. Async collaborative tools have come a long way. Wikis, while not perfect, are great for information sharing and knowledge transfer. They're not so good when dealing with ever evolving projects though. The state of collaborative products is improving but right now we're little better than we were a half century ago with just picking up the phone. Screen sharing makes remote work a bit easier, but most multi-person jobs require more than just show the contents of a single screen. Digital whiteboards (and the hardware to use them effectively), multiple document display, and [nearly] lag-free communication are just the start of what an all remote workforce needs. As a programmer we also need a platform for async and collaborative code-review.

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But we now have 2, and soon to be 3, developers working at least part time from home. I work full time in another city; another dev will soon be full time remote as well. Stuff still gets done right and on time. They are slowly learning to deal with not being able to "see" us at our desk, but there's still this attitude that crops up every now and then that "working from home" is having a day off.

On my current project we have one permanently remote developer and most of us take a day a week as remote. Our experience is that the permanently remote dev has been "sequestered" to a single portion of the project that is "his". Our platform to communicate, effectively, is a phone + screen sharing; which is not particularly conducive to working with him. When we take our day a week remote it tends to be similar: we work on "our" thing and, if one happens to fall on our day, attend meetings via phone. Which ends up being a (mostly) one-way street. When all you have is your voice to communicate information/ideas it tends to limit your ability to communicate.

We're starting to get to the point that an all remote workforce is possible in most (non service) jobs. It's not surprising that it's positions that are, by their nature, mobile are experiencing the greatest adoption of mobile technology. Prior to smartphones, tablets and the mobile web those people had to build a workflow around the telephone and snail mail. Having email and instant document upload availability is a boon to their workflow.

Call me old and crotchety (even though I'm in my mid-20s) but this is a trend I'm not too fond of. When I leave the office, I want to be completely offline from work, which is why no one at work knows my phone number or email address - Facebook is definitely out. The entire point of going home is to stop working and mobile working intrudes significantly on that for me if I can be contacted or tracked after hours. I'm also very lairy of giving another party partial or full control over the administration and security of a personal mobile device with personal data on it.

There have been several studies that say remote workers are not a productive as those that work from an office. I think the entire remoting trend is currently on a downturn with a lot of companies bringing more people in house. I don't think I would pay people to work remotely (especially from home), it gives people (especially some sorts of people) too many distractions.

Full disclosure: I work for Rapid7, who make this product. I do not work in marketing or sales and am speaking about this product only because I happen to know it exists, which I did not before I worked here.

This is definitely its niche; BYOD has its own concerns for corporate IT to now have to worry about. I think that this sort of thing will be more and more popular in the future, so rather than have rogue devices, maybe it's good for the company to embrace change and pre-empt it.

Fascinating article, but I feel that fatigue is being overlooked when it comes to mobile devices.

Desktop PC's will always be the most ergonomic way to do general work on a computer, from sending an email, to assembling large projects etc. Posture is configurable, and employees can work for long periods of time without significant strain when it is configured well. tablets and phones soon become very neck and arm intensive after a short amount of time, and some tasks take longer to perform on a touch screen.

I don't know much on injuries related to working with bad posture, but I can imagine that they can hurt a company if employees need to start taking time off to see a physio for neck pain etc.

There have been several studies that say remote workers are not a productive as those that work from an office. I think the entire remoting trend is currently on a downturn with a lot of companies bringing more people in house. I don't think I would pay people to work remotely (especially from home), it gives people (especially some sorts of people) too many distractions.

I don't think it's simple stuff like distractions. When you work around colleagues, you *gasp* learn from them a lot quicker than when you work alone or with a physical separation. As a lone worker running a one man show myself, I experience this whenever I get a chance to work with someone else. My productivity or ability to learn new things increases.

I completely agree. There's a loss in brainstorming and being able to bounce ideas off each other. OTOH, I don't have my productivity reduced by office noise and politics. And if I am trying to figure out something I don't know how to do using Stack Overflow instead of just asking the guy at the next desk, it may take me longer but I sure know how to do it in the end instead of having someone solve my problem for me and I kinda sorta know how ti work snow.

There are trade-offs for sure.

Not every person and every job is cut out to work remotely. For example, my experience with parents attempting to work at home with kids around is that even the ones with nannies suffer major interruptions no matter what. And many people I talk to just flat out say they'd never get any work done, they'd watch TV or whatever.

I think the people commenting about the loss of personal life are correct to be skeptical. Like others, I have chosen to accept less money in exchange for the fact that if I called by work on my time off, it's because there's a major crisis. I don't look at email or work otherwise. When I'm off I'm OFF. I've been in the opposite situation and it gets old fast. Work-life balance is really important to your sanity.

Then again, I don't understand how people travel for a living, but some seem to thrive on it. To each their own.

Call me old and crotchety (even though I'm in my mid-20s) but this is a trend I'm not too fond of. When I leave the office, I want to be completely offline from work, which is why no one at work knows my phone number or email address - Facebook is definitely out. The entire point of going home is to stop working and mobile working intrudes significantly on that for me if I can be contacted or tracked after hours. I'm also very lairy of giving another party partial or full control over the administration and security of a personal mobile device with personal data on it.

I've never given an employer my real cellphone number. They get my google voice number, which I have the ability to shut off at specific periods of time.

I get all the benefits of having contact information in the company, but I also get an incredibly fine level of control. At the job I had with a direct office line, I could forward the google voice number there too during business hours.

I also have to separate work and personal life and I can't imagine having "a career" where you're on a leash 24/7. I even carry two iPhones and the work iPhone gets turned off when I'm off. I make less money than I could, I even turned down offers that could lead to promotions, but I like to have more time for myself.

So I'm a developer, fancy job title and all, but I choose not to have work email taint my phone. You know why? It's my life. If something is on fire somebody will call you.

I don't work in medical or rockets, ymmv.

Too bad more people aren't like you, all these companies thinking they own you every moment of every day (and night), and that you should somehow always be contactable in multiple ways. There really isn't any reason except they get more work from you without having to pay you, or hire more staff - and it's not like there's an unemployment problem in the world where people could use the work.

I have this suspicion that the always-on workforce is a means for corporations to get a lot of unpaid overtime from staff whose work ethic pushes them towards always being available to their managers. It's instructive to calculate your real hourly wage by including all those extra hours you put in to check this and that, to see that things are ticking over, to just touch base when you're home sick.

I do all my work (as a design verification engineer, aka programmer if you don't know the title) on two devices (which are personal devices, as our company is pretty "BYOD"): My Sony Vaio Duo 11 tablet/laptop hybrid (I guess "slate"?) running Windows 8, and my Nokia Lumia 920 cellphone. I can take care of email/calendar correspondence on my phone, and call into meetings. I do all my programming (& etc) work by remote desktop into our Linux servers, and occasionally ssh. I have Outlook and other Office programs on my computer as well. I carry it into meetings and take notes with a stylus in OneNote. If I need to get work done over VPN remotely, I can do so over Wifi, which I can connect to tethered to my cellphone if necessary.

When I go into the office (which I prefer, just because it's my "workspace" and I can interact with coworkers), I plug my slate computer into a USB 3.0 dock which connects it to my headphones, two displays, external keyboard, and trackball. If I need to go somewhere, I just unplug it and go.

This is mobile technology at its finest.

P.S.: And yes, while I do have these on my personal devices, it's pretty much understood that it'll be hard to reach anyone after 6 PM, and work will likely not occur until the next morning. They can call if it's time-sensitive, which isn't common.

Barely a few days of vacation a year for the average American worker?Remote devices keeping the worker tied to the office at all hours of the day and night?Salary structured in such a way that the worker doesn't actually get paid for all this extra work?

The second I step out of the office I am no longer working or thinking about work -- I'm not getting paid to. Work from home? You must be joking. I'd rather shack up at a coworking office than turn my place of leisure into one of industry.

So what exactly makes a modern job any different from being a slave with a collar around your neck and your boss hitting you with a virtual whip?

Anyone asking that doesn't know jack about actual slavery.

With that being said, the "virtual whip" you're talking about actually lets most people that aren't busy whining about their cushy tech jobs mold the job to fit their schedules, instead of the other way around.

Call me old and crotchety (even though I'm in my mid-20s) but this is a trend I'm not too fond of. When I leave the office, I want to be completely offline from work, which is why no one at work knows my phone number or email address - Facebook is definitely out. The entire point of going home is to stop working and mobile working intrudes significantly on that for me if I can be contacted or tracked after hours. I'm also very lairy of giving another party partial or full control over the administration and security of a personal mobile device with personal data on it.

Here here.. I find this trend in the corporate US to be getting worse. These mobile computing devices are supposed to make our lives better, but instead it is allowing the 'work-aholic' management ways to push workers to work outside of the normal work day. Now I have a BYOD iPhone; they pay the bill I own the device and have agreed to help outside of normal business hours. However, there are well understood limits in our department (IT Tech Support)..

Friends who work in other departments do not have such a nice well defined limit; and other groups totally abuse the work force in this regard. I have been told by many that they are expected to 'Get it done' regardless of how many hours on their own time they work.

Smartphones and tablets let employees work anywhere—as long as IT is on board.

Tell that to my boss who says I have to be in the office every day.

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"My three main work tools are my iPhone, iPad, and the Moleskine [a paper notebook that integrates with Evernote's iOS app]," Burton said in a phone interview. These devices—along with cloud services and apps for file management, document creation, and other tasks—help Burton "create the same workflow regardless of where I am."

This is awesome. A Law Firm that stores confidential legal documents online for hackers to access with ease. I will not be hiring them for my next legal situation.

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—he just logs into it from his iPad with the LogMeIn remote desktop management tool.

Just add this to the above - using 3rd party software to remotely log into another computer and transfer documents. I'm wondering how different LogMeIn, Inc's ToS is to other 3rd party companies that like to keep tabs on everything their Users are doing.

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Burton's case is a little bit extreme now, but in a few years it may not be. Forrester Research has been tracking the rise of mobile workers, saying in its 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends report, "Gone are the days when employees wielded a simple set of tools to get work done. In today’s world of anytime, anywhere work, employees use whatever device is most convenient: desktop at home, laptop at work, tablet in a client meeting, or smartphone everywhere."

Well with running software titles such as Maya or Final Cut or Photoshop or InDesign for large-scale projects - until all of this can be accomplished with the same degree of efficieny on a tablet or phone as can be from a heavy-duty laptop or desktop (or the demand suddenly drops to nothing) then my work wil remain less "mobile".

This also means that when I leave the office - I leave the work. Nothing is so important that I need to be working on it at midnight from my home using a tablet.

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"I didn't like having that extra piece to carry around, so I just trained myself to type as proficiently on the screen as I do on a keyboard," Burton said.

Bullshit. There is still no comparison between using the iOS on-screen keyboard w/ a tactile full keyboard.

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Several new technologies are helping businesses enable work on smartphones and tablets without putting company data at risk. This is especially a concern for bring-your-own-device scenarios in which employees use devices they bought themselves in both their personal lives and work....

....One solution is "dual-persona" technology that creates a secure workspace within a phone or tablet that contains only work applications and data. Data can't move from the work container to the rest of the phone and vice versa.

Yep - they should keep telling themselves that - makes the companies bosses "feel" more secure.

Never have understood why people wnat to do this. The boss will not accept the excuse that your personal device failed so you are exempt from doing your job. The company that employs you is not responsible for repair - maintenance and upkeep of your personal equipment.

Let's not even get into the ramifications of employee termination while someone has sensitive company content on their personal device.

"I'm an early riser. I get those out at four in the morning, get to work, and I can carry that on to the rest of the day," he said.

I was wondering what "those" he was referring to, until I realised it was the iDevices mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Why do the people featured in stories about trendy modern working practises always sound like the sort of extrovert, type-A workaholic (although typically working in a bullshit industry) that you would, if you ever met them, literally break your foot before you'd tire of kicking them in the balls?

Working when you're not supposed to be working is not a desirable thing, except in cases where people really love and are passionate about the work they do (in which case they don't as easily get the "burnt out on work effect" where they need a long recharge, etc). Weekends and vacations exist for a reason. The human brain needs and can benefit from a few days of diversion and new types of stimulation not related to staring at computer or phone screens, writing emails, etc.

If you work hard and in a focused way M-F, there's rarely any benefit to putting in those extra hours over the weekend or at night unless you're a brand new startup or have some truly urgent situation where if you don't work in those random moments things will fall apart.

Take a deep breath, and step away from your mobile / social media / 200 people demanding your attention who don't actually warrant your attention in most cases.

Call me old and crotchety (even though I'm in my mid-20s) but this is a trend I'm not too fond of. When I leave the office, I want to be completely offline from work, which is why no one at work knows my phone number or email address - Facebook is definitely out. The entire point of going home is to stop working and mobile working intrudes significantly on that for me if I can be contacted or tracked after hours. I'm also very lairy of giving another party partial or full control over the administration and security of a personal mobile device with personal data on it.

my sentiment exactly. as convenient as it would be for me to work from home, I try to keep my home life and work life separate. I am not a live to work type. I have a family and a life of my own, when I am home I don't enjoy talking about work(it's not that my job is terrible, i really like my job) it's just that to me, when i'm home I spend time with my family and unwind.

Yes, we have all these devices. But no, we are not always available. People need to understand this. Soon.

Availability technologies are fast outpacing common decency and courtesy. A broader discussion of how to manage user/customer/employer expectations is increasingly urgent. The sense may be that we're all always checking for text messages with '911' in them, just sitting around doing nothing waiting for someone to issue instructions. But we all have our own lives. And there is still such a thing as "work hours."

In the days of land lines, there was never the expectation that everyone was always by the phone. Now that our phones are in our pockets, suddenly everyone takes it personally when we don't answer right away everytime. This expectation needs to evolve in-step with the increasing availability our mobile technologies provide.

Barely a few days of vacation a year for the average American worker?Remote devices keeping the worker tied to the office at all hours of the day and night?Salary structured in such a way that the worker doesn't actually get paid for all this extra work?

The second I step out of the office I am no longer working or thinking about work -- I'm not getting paid to. Work from home? You must be joking. I'd rather shack up at a coworking office than turn my place of leisure into one of industry.

My wife turns her Blackberry off when she goes on holiday and after 6 at night, her US colleagues are astounded by such actions, in fact they are specifically told to take their phones on holiday which would be fine if the employer would restitute the holidays but I guess that's not on the cards.

People need to use the off button more, there is such a thing as a work/life balance.

This is not the first time I've heard this future of an office-less workspace. While current devices are sufficient for a subset of workers, mostly those that consume content. By and large current devices are insufficient if you spend any significant amount of time creating content. At work we have a BYOD policy for mobile devices, for me it supplements rather than replaces my laptop. Now my laptop allows me to work from pretty much anywhere I can get a good internet connection, screenspace is still a limiting factor though.

The fact I can work pretty much anytime, anywhere does not mean that I do though. I very much hold to the mantra of work to live, not live to work.

While I am all up for working from home or anywhere really, unless you can get paid the hours you work or for the stuff you do for work then it is a form of slavery.

I can see how employers can take this and use it against their employees.

Unless you are FLSA-exempt ( a relatively rare category), employers are required by federal law to pay you for hours worked.

If you ARE exempt, you should know that going into a position. What this means is that you are paid a certain amount of money per week no matter how much (or how little) you actually work that week. If I were in that position, I would set definite boundaries right off the bat (no availability nights, no weekends, no holidays), unless my job was one that was advertised as one where you might be on-call at all hours.If my employer persisted, I would seek other employment.

He sounds a lot like what is commonly referred to as “teenagers”. For some other reason I was thinking about media consumption in my peer group, and it struck me that 90 per cent of my peers don't actually ever go off-line these days, except when they sleep. But they just put their phones in the recharger and leave it on, so I don't know if that counts as being off-line even then.

If someone important texts at 3 am, I'm not sure that my friends wouldn't get up and read it.

In my former school, which I graduated this May, we once had a group project and it struck me that it was a weird one because even though we were separate, through the wonders of the school intranet and smart phones, we were working on the project even though we were quite separated from each other.

While few teens have tablets, and the ownership of laptops are more limited, nearly everyone has a smart phone. And nearly everyone is connected all the time. This guy sounds like he's expanded this through emulation or early adoption. So yeah, it will probably be more common in years to come as we teenagers enter the workplace.

Of course, we have to bump off the dinosaurs first and take their jobs so that we get to decide things...